From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Jan 15 2004 - 13:16:51 EST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>
To: <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2004 6:28 PM
Subject: Re: Klingon
> At 18:06 +0100 2004-01-15, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> >From: <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
> > > Michael Everson scripsit:
> > > >
> > > > yIjachQo'. vItlhob.
> > >
> >> Demonstrating once again that the One True Script for Klingon is
Latin.
> >
> >Not really: look at how uppercase letters are used: case mapping, which
is
> >quite safe in languages written with the Latin script, completely breaks
the
> >Klingon text...
> >
> >Michael did not write: "Yijachqo'. Vitlhob."
>
> Many Latin-script languages write capital letters
> in non-initial positions. Irish does quite
> regularly: "an tSín" 'China'. Breton does
> sometimes. It is common in transliterations of
> Tibetan.
I admit this exists, I don't think it's a good idea to use such weak
conventions, which are justified only by the fact that one is technically
constrained to use a restricted subset of Latin. If people could use more
distinctive letters in Latin, such caveats would be avoided.
For Breton, I don't agree with you. Even if Breton has the trigraph <c'h>
considered as one letter, and whose appropriate titlecase is the trigraph
<C'H>, not the trigraph <C'h>. See "Aber Wrac'h", also written in uppercase
"ABER WRAC'H". Words starting by the trigraph letter <c'h> are rare in
Breton, but even in that case, I see NO use of such "abuse" of Latin letter
case other than a way to represent a missing diacritic or a missing letter.
> Of course, Philippe seems to be suggesting that the One True Script for
Klingon is *not* Latin,
> because he thinks that yIjachQo' is not Latin, while Yijach1o' is. Which
is, well, incredible.
No, I said that both are Latin, but they would be considered equal under
case-insensitive searches, despite they are really coding distinct letters.
For example the Klingon Mandel "Q" is mostly a Mandel "qH", but bot a simple
Mandel "q", and is still distinct from Mandel "qh" (which is mostly like a
French "r")...
The presence of case distinctions as meaning strong primary letter
distinctions in these conventions just denotes a missing diacritic or
separate letter for the Latin transliteration...This is still a (very poor)
transliteration system, with its imperfections, and as with other
transliteration systems, it breaks the initial script design and semantic
structure and is a clear sign that this is a plain separate script (as it
was the intent of Tolkien when he created the script).
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